Ex-hitman walks away from road rage incident

TORONTO — One danger of road rage is never knowing who is driving the car that is the target of your fury. This was highlighted when a man confronted a driver after a traffic incident and behind the wheel was a serial-killing Mafia hit man notorious for his explosive temper and propensity for violence.

Kenneth Murdock is on parole in Canada for three murders, gunshot slayings done at the behest of Mafia figures in Hamilton, Ont. His lengthy criminal history also includes extortion, assault causing bodily harm, armed robbery, weapons offences, possession of narcotics and others. He once shot a robbery victim in the leg. While in prison, he routinely fought other inmates and always seemed to win.

“I’ll fight at the drop of a dime,” Murdock once admitted.

He was known on the streets of Hamilton as impetuous, violent and strong.

Once, when emerging from jail and looking for a job, he walked into Bannister’s, a large and rough strip club in the heart of Hamilton’s downtown, and asked the head of security for a job as a bouncer. “We already have somebody,” the man said, pointing to a large man standing outside the DJ’s booth. Murdock walked through the club, jogged up the stairs to the bouncer, and — without a word — beat him up.

“(I) gave him a couple of shots to the head, kicked him while he was down. He got up and I told him to f— off, he didn’t work here anymore.” When the man in charge of security tried to break the fight up, he too was thrown down by Murdock. “I got my job,” he later said.

Such talent was spotted and cultivated by the Mafia in the city and he was recruited into the Musitano crime family. He served as a loyal and dedicated henchman. When the Mob family’s patriarch, Dominic Musitano, died in 1995, Murdock was asked to be in the honour guard at his funeral.

Murdock was willing to do anything for the family.

On Nov. 21, 1985, then 22 and on parole, he opened fire with a submachine-gun on a factory janitor who owed his boss money, killing the 53-year-old in his garage.

On May 31, 1997, he knocked on the warehouse headquarters of Johnny “Pops” Papalia, the long-reigning Mafia boss in Ontario and a Musitano family rival. As he chatted with the 73-year-old mobster in the parking lot, he pressed a .38-calibre revolver to the back of his head and shot him dead.

His next target was Carmen Barillaro, a loyal lieutenant to the Papalia family who promised to avenge his boss’s murder. On July 23, 1997, with a Musitano family member waiting in Murdock’s car, he knocked on the front door of Barillaro’s Niagara Falls, Ont., house and gunned him down with a 9-mm pistol after he answered.

When asked if he would have killed someone for $1,000, Murdock replied: “If it was for the family, I would have done it for nothing.”

But when the Mobsters he had been loyal to threatened to kill him — to “make me part of the compost,” Murdock once said — he became a co-operating witness against them.

After serving 13 years of his life sentence, Murdock was released on full parole. He has since had regular hearings with the parole board to monitor his progress and to decide if his freedom should be continued.

He legally changed his name in 2012 when he was trying to become a truck driver, likely in Western Canada.

Because he is a co-operating witness who testified against reputed Mafia bosses and is apparently progressing toward rehabilitation, the National Post is not publishing his new name.

And since then, Murdock, 50, who legally changed his name in 2012, has been doing well while out on parole. He is holding down a job as a truck driver. He has respected the rules at his halfway house and attended monthly counselling sessions, his parole records show.

Recently, though, came an unexpected test when he was involved in a “traffic incident” with another motorist. The incident took place in the past few months in an unspecified city, probably in British Columbia, and was revealed at his latest review by the Parole Board of Canada.

The motorist followed Murdock and confronted him, “exchanging words” with him. He described the situation as one of the “difficult” ones he has faced in the community.